Labor pledges fairer work and fairer wages

Under the Same Job, Same Pay plan, which was originally moved as a Private Member's Bill by Labor Leader Anthony Albanese late last year, businesses would have to pay workers employed through labour-hire companies the same as those employed directly.

Mr Burke told the assembled employees extending the power of the Fair Work Commission to protect those in precarious employment was key to the ALP's employment policies.

"At companies like Amazon, the Fair Work Commission has no access to the workers because they're technically not employees," he said.

"We want to get the Fair Work Commission Power to be able to represent those workers and set minimum standards."

The Shadow Minister said doing this would benefit all workers in several ways.

"First of all, it means that we do stop replacing permanent jobs with lower-paid casual ones," Mr Burke said.

"Secondly, it means if you negotiate a rate of pay for the site, that becomes the rate of pay at the site.

"Thirdly, for this growing sector of the workforce where people have no minimum standards at all, we'll set minimum standards for them for the first time. They are really simple changes, and they can be done."

Mr Burke assured small and medium-sized business owners that the policies he was proposing would have minimal impact on their operations.

"The big rorts that have happened haven't really been in small to medium enterprises," Mr Burke said.

"What tends to happen is in some of the larger companies we've seen situations where an enterprise agreement gets negotiated.

"Then a few months later, labour-hire starts turning up, undercutting the agreement and undercutting the wages and conditions that have been negotiated.

Mr Burke said the main focus was "dishonest" employers who were using legal technicalities to avoid paying all workers at the same rates, and existing enterprise agreements would be protected.

"Employers have already gone through negotiations in good faith saying this will be the rate of pay on a site," he said.

"You shouldn't have those good-faith negotiations and effectively be dishonest by going out and using the technical device of 'it's a different employer', even though it's the exact same job."

"Very few small and medium businesses have enterprise agreements of that nature."

Mr Burke also said the labour-hire industry itself was valuable to employers, and the ALP was not seeking to abolish the practice altogether.

"There'll always be a role for labour-hire," he said.

"At the moment where there's a shortage of workers, a lot of businesses are using hire because they can't find people. So they're outsourcing recruitment and that's completely reasonable.

"What labour-hire should never be is a way of making wages cheaper or a way of making costs of living harder for people."